Today is the 19-year anniversary of my brother’s death near Baghdad, Iraq. After 9/11, I had feared his deployment to a war zone. I wrote the following poem when he received orders, then changed orders, and changed-again orders, until the U.S. went into Iraq and then the orders stuck. I wrote it from the perspective of a child because that was where my bond with my brother began. I would always be–deep, down in my heart–that little kid who waited by the door for him to come home from school, who wanted to follow him everywhere.
The week before he deployed, I had a night of vivid dreams that I was surprised to wake up from. At first, I was tip-toeing around soldiers sleeping under jungle brush (likely my brain’s shoutout to Platoon, one of my favorite movies at the time), tucking pillows under their heads. I was looking for my brother, but leaving pillows for the others.
And then, like it was a natural skip in time, I was sitting on the edge of my bed putting on my shoes to get ready for work. Willie was leaning against the wall by the window and we were talking about his deployment and how worried I was. I asked how he felt about it. I cannot remember his answer, but we talked and talked until I awoke to find myself still laying in the dark silence of the wee hours of morning. It felt so real, him standing there and us talking, even though he’d never been to that apartment. When I had posed the question to him by phone in waking-life a few months before, he had answered, “May, it’s me. You have nothing to worry about.”
Anyway, a week after that dream, he was in Iraq. And, four months later, he was gone. Not a day has gone by that I didn’t think of him at least once, and this anniversary day is especially hard for me. Every year, I think I’ll be able to smile with the good memories and leave the rest out, but it never goes that way. There is real grief in losing your first friend and you feel it, you never stop feeling the missing. I have playlists and poems that I turn to, of course.
This next poem, however…this is the best I can say what I’m missing.
Edward William Carman was my first friend and we survived chaos together. He did not deserve to die when he did, how he did. But, it is what it is, and all I can do is remember him. All the time.
I love you and miss you, Will. It still feels exactly the same; love never fades.
